THE CR.ITICS BOOKS GOD IN THE DETAILS Graham Greene's religious realism. BY R.UTH FR.ANKLIN B orges, in one of his enigmatic para- bles, imagined an empire in which the art of cartography had "attained such perfection" that a map was exactly the same size as the area it covered. At well over two thousand pages, Norman Sher- ry's authorized biography of Graham Greene, a writer whose slender novels are distinguished by a near-phobia of the extraneous, occasionally seems in danger of reaching a similar condition. The third volume of "The Life of Graham Greene" (Viking; $39.95) has at last arrived, fif- teen years after the publication of Vol- e I, and thirty years after Greene des- ignated Sherry his biographer. Sherry's sluggish pace owes some- thing to the difficwty of summing up the career of this stunningly prodigious writer. During a writing life of more than sixty years, Greene published twenty- six novels, in an almost unseemly variety of genres, ranging from early thrillers and "entertainments" such as "Brighton Rock" and "This Gun for Hire," through the famous "Catholic trilogy" of his mid- dIe years, to a more experimental later phase that includes such uncategoriz- able works as "Travels with My Aunt" and "Monsignor Qyixote." He also pro- duced short stories, plays, film scripts, memoirs, and travel books, plus a vast quantity of correspondence, to much of which Sherry has had exclusive access. (Because of an ambiguous comma in a document Greene signed on his death- bed, other scholars were forbidden to quote from unpublished material until Sherry's project was complete.) The mention of Graham Greene in- evitably evokes "Greeneland," reviewers' shorthand for the fictional terrain where all of Greene's novels seem to be set-a desolate colonial outpost with unforgiv- ing weather, which is inhabited by mid- level civil servants, simple-hearted lo- cals, and adulterous wives. Greene was always annoyed by this trope, insisting that his books "carefully and accurately described" the world as he experienced it. As if to prove his point, he extracted from Sherry a promise to "follow in his footsteps" to wherever he had set a major work-Mexico, Liberia, Cuba, Vietnam, Haiti, the Congo, and numerous other inhospitable locations. In the course of fù1fi11ing this promise, Sherry contracted gangrene, which required the removal of part of his intestines. His relief at bring- ing the project to completion is written all over this third volume; in eight pages of acknowledgments, he thanks his Buick dealer, his periodontist, his post- man, and "Nellie the night janitoress, who nearly always caught me in the late hours working." Operating under the assumption that every place Greene went and every per- son he met is significant, Sherry has inev- Itably become bogged down in the most minute details. But he did discover that Greene had based a number of his char- acters on real people, the most impor- tant of whom, Sherry argues, was him- self This presents a particwar problem. Greene lived his life to extremes: he had serious affairs, sometimes simwtaneously; with at least three women, amid a host of more casual liaisons; he spied for MI6, smoked opium, visited prostitutes. How- ever, he displayed a remarkable equanim- ity in the midst of chaos, maintaining a matutinal regimen of five hundred words regardless of the circumstances. Com- bine this with a delight in secrecy- Greene was given to writing two versions of a diary entry to conceal a visit to a prostitute, to using the names of his char- acters as aliases on his business cards, and to sending two postcards to his mistress, a chaste version addressed to her and her husband at home, and a more intimate one for her to collect elsewhere-and he is a difficult subject indeed. He once wrote to Catherine Walston, one of ills longtime lovers, "If anybody ever tries to write a biography of me, how compli- cated they are going to find it and how misled they are going to be." T he fourth of six children, Henry Graham Greene was born Oc- tober 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, En- gland. The family lived at Berkhamsted School, where Greene's father worked his way up to headmaster, and later in life Greene recalled the "green baize door" that separated the safety of the family's living quarters from the alien world of the school. A shy boy, devoid of atWetic talent, he suffered severe de- pressions as a teen-ager and became fascinated with suicide. His autobiogra- phy, "A Sort of Life," details experi- ments with Russian rowette, but Sherry also reports less convincing early at- tempts such as eating a tin of hair po- made and going swimming after taking more than a dozen aspirin. (In an unau- thorized biography, Michae] Shelden alleged that there was a more serious incident, in which Greene tried to hang himself in a potting shed.) At the age of sixteen, he was sent to a London psychoanalyst. Though he flourished in the cwtured atmosphere of the analyst's home, the treatment did little to ban- ish the allure that suicide held for him, which manifested itself repeatedly in his work. 0 While a student at Oxford, where he In Greene's life, all encounters-from the most casual to the most passionate--vJere potential sources for his fiction.